Hermès reports 23% jump in sales as super-rich continue to spend big
Hermès, the maker of £5,000-plus Birkin and Kelly handbags, has reported a 23% jump in sales in the first three months of the year, becoming the latest luxury goods company to benefit from wealthy shoppers spending big despite the cost of living crisis.
Eric du Halgouët, Hermès’s finance director, said the French company was benefiting from “very dynamic traffic” into its stores particularly in Asia, which was “driven by a very good Chinese New Year”, as well as Italy and the UK where “increase in tourist flows” helped lift overall quarterly sales to €3.4bn (£3bn).
The company said demand for its expensive leather handbags is so strong it is opening a string of new “artisan” factories to ramp up production. Last week it opened a new facility in Louviers, Normandy, employing 140 leather workers making its 25cm Kelly bag, and plans to double the size of its workforce within four years.
Each Kelly bag, which was renamed after the Hollywood legend Grace Kelly in the 1950s when she was photographed holding the bag over her belly to conceal early signs of pregnancy, takes between 14 and 20 hours to make and is produced by a single dedicated leather-worker.
The Birkin is named after the it-girl Jane Birkin, who the then Hermès chief executive Jean-Louis Dumas sat next to in the first class compartment of a Paris-to-London flight in 1983. As she placed her straw travel bag into the overhead bin the contents fell out to the floor of the plane, leaving her and Dumas to scrabble around to pick them up.
She explained to him she was having trouble finding a leather bag big enough for everything a young mother needed to carry. A year later Hermès debuted the large Birkin bag, and she was given a personalised bag for nothing. In 2011 she
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